When clinical psychologist Scarlett Wong began receiving children in Gaza for treatment, her team was told the kids needed help for developmental delay or autism. But their condition had nothing to do with either. They were starving.
"When you see a starving child, they are apathetic - they have no response," Wong told SBS News. "That is the kind of thing we were seeing from a medical view ..
. children have become frozen, with no emotion and apathetic." The United Nations has warned Palestinians in Gaza are enduring , a situation the UN secretary general said was "entirely man-made".
Israel has been accused by human rights groups and the European Union's foreign policy chief of using starvation as a weapon of war - claims it has denied, saying it is acting in self-defence against Hamas's 7 October attacks. Wong spent three weeks in Gaza earlier this year in the midst of war while volunteering for Médecins Sans Frontières, describing her experience as the "the worst humanitarian disaster I have ever seen". The Sydney-based doctor said , saying while she had seen starvation before, she had never seen people "be starved".
One of the most surreal moments, she told SBS News, was seeing children flying homemade kites with quad-copters shooting in the background. For her, it was a sign of hope and resilience to see children find a way to be children amidst the devastation. "Children haven't been to school for seven months and if you think about what that was like during COVID fo.
